Teachable Moments: Comte's science led to early socialism

Future generations of philosophers rejected his views

12:24 AM,
Sep. 5, 2013

Auguste Comte

Written by

The founder of a scientific approach to understanding how people live and work together should understand that theories must survive the experiments designed to prove them.

Auguste Comte, who died on Sept. 5, 1857, was a French philosopher who proposed that the progression of scientific knowledge would lead humans to develop a science of humanity, which he called "sociology," and a scientific approach to governance, which he called "positivism."

He was extremely influential during the 19th and early 20th centuries as other philosophers and social critics pursued the value of progress ...